Life after death row A year after his release from prison, Echols has chosen to settle in Salem for a reason: he feels a kinship with the history of the place. He knows what it's like to be the object of a witch hunt.

Finding reward - and real learning - in the ivory tower Age 30, I quit the Phoenix and ended up with a job as an apprentice to a carpenter. Sawing, chiseling, hammering, nail-gunning, tiling, sanding, slotting, framing, hauling, measuring, and sweeping are less obvious outcomes of an undergraduate career in the liberal arts. College, in strange and unexpected ways, prepared me for this sort of work. And in others, did not prepare me at all.

Worried about writing that thesis? Turns out writing could be the least of your problems. I knew a man pursuing a PhD in literature. His dissertation had to do with humor as a form of dissent in 20th-century literature. And how enthused he was at first! How passionate and excited.

Son of a famous-author father, novelist Andre Dubus III had to write his own way out of a violent youth Andre Dubus III collected me at the Newburyport train station last month when the snow piles were already high. We stopped first for a coffee for the road; he asked all the questions: siblings, hometown, are you married?

What we wish someone had told us about making the best of the college experience We're all idiots when we're 18. We're all idiots for the first half of our 20s, and longer, for some. By saying so, we're not trying to insult anyone.

From OpenCourseWare to co-ops, area schools are taking their learning outside the classroom Back in 2000, when Google was two years old and the all-for-naught panic over a worldwide Y2K meltdown had subsided, the MIT faculty had to answer two questions: how is the Internet going to change education? And what are we going to do about it?

Stress is just another present we open this time of year It used to be so easy. It used to be all egg nog and hanging your favorite ornaments, sugar cookies and Yule logs, candle-lighting and leaving carrots for Santa's reindeer fleet.

A few basic skills could help you survive the apocalypse — and reconnect to the real world It's easy to get apocalyptic. Worst case scenarios can be conjured in a few broad strokes — oil crisis, poisoned reservoir, terrorists murder the Internet.

Outside the World Cup, seeing South Africa in black and white The FIFA complex here is a swishy maze of a mall, all upscale shops and unrelenting fluorescent lights, attaching the hotels to each other before spilling out into Nelson Mandela Square, which is right now dominated by a Sony tent — a 3D World Cup viewing pavilion — and circled by tourist restaurants.

Spooky? A bit, but Massachusetts's cemeteries are also the bucolic, final resting places of many great American writers. I asked the question this way: "Where would you want to be buried?" Not "do," but "would." That is to say if, by chance, you were to die, unlikely as that might be, where would you want to spend all of nonexistence?

David Lipsky’s Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself treads lightly in the footsteps of a literary giant
David Foster Wallace had a crush on Alanis Morissette. He drank Diet Rite soda by the case. David Lynch changed him.